[X] My Assistant

[SigurRosFan]

Original link: http://www.msss.com/mars_images/moc/2005/09/15/

Okay, okay. It's only a FLOW of a SEA oF DUNES.

[edstrick]

Dick was a good author, wrote a lot of trash, but as Sturgeon's Revelation states: "90% of Science Fiction is Crud. 90% of EVERYTHING is Crud!". And he wrote some utterly damnfine fiction as well. Not that Hollywood can tell what's good or bad. "The Man in the High Castle"... 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Nah..they'd never film that. Note comments in the reviews:

http://www.philipkdick.com/works_novels_mancastle.html

Hollywood and the literary establishment has a very very limited stable of Science Fiction writers they are even aware of, excluding some of the most important names in the field. Most of their awareness falls on writers who match their social-political vision of reality, and relatively conservative writers like Anderson are utterly outside their view.

[dvandorn]

Hollywood and the literary establishment has a very very limited stable of Science Fiction writers they are even aware of, excluding some of the most important names in the field.  Most of their awareness falls on writers who match their social-political vision of reality, and relatively conservative writers like Anderson are utterly outside their view.

While I really can't explain the popularity of Phil Dick's stories as the (extremely loose) basis for a number of Hollywood films, I don't think that political content is the major factor. Face it, Poul Anderson's works tend to be of vaster scope than Dick's (dealing with great historical trends and mapping such trends against possible future histories). As such, they're not as conducive to nice, edgy, self-contained 93-minute screenplays.

Anderson's future histories, including the van Rijn stories and the Flandry stories, would far better suit themselves to longer, episodic forms. Like episodic television, or a brace of mini-series.

And for all of those who saw "Ensign Flandry" as thinly-disguised justification for the war in Vietnam, I'm sorry to say that I found more parallels with the expansion and maintenance of the Roman Empire in the Flandry series than any statement of political views relating to 20th-century America. But, of course, that could just be my own perception.

-the other Doug